Part One: The Serpent
She’d lived hundreds oflifetimes, and it was always the same. A world on the edge of annihilation. The desperate struggle to save it. Death, though never hers. Destruction. Then on to the next with no memories of the people or places left behind.
Chapter one
Theworldbrokeitselfapart behind her.
Light shattered. Noise fractured. Her body stretched thin between worlds as the wormhole flung her through time and space, stripping her down to pieces.
Faces burned across her vision—
A girl laughing with blood on her cheeks.
A man’s hand, fingers severed, reaching through smoke.
Red banners flaring in the sky.
A brother? A lover? Gone.
None of it stayed. None of it mattered.
The sky tore open around her. She fell screaming through it, through air that felt too real after the void, limbs flailing uselessly in freefall. Below—mountains.Trees. A forest swallowing the horizon in green teeth.
Branches caught her first, slamming against armor, scraping bare skin where the joints left her exposed. Something cracked in her side. Another branch spun her sideways. A gauntlet tore free with a metallic shriek, spiraling off into the canopy.
Then—ground.
The impact crushed the air from her lungs in a soundless huff. Pain lanced up her spine, white-hot and immediate.
Then—stillness.
Her chest convulsed, heaving air in jagged, broken gasps. The taste of dirt sat thick on her tongue. Blood wept sluggishly from a cut at her hairline, blurring one eye.
Move. Get up.
Her body didn’t want to listen. Trembling hands scrabbled at the forest floor—wet moss, old leaves, something sharp slicing her palm open. Metal. Plating. Not hers. Not anymore.
One elbow locked. Then the other. She forced herself upright onto shaking knees.
“Fuuuh…what the fuck.” The words slurred in her throat. They didn’t sound right.
What was hers? Who was—
Her head tipped forward. Sweat dripped from her chin onto the soil. One foot found purchase. Then the other. She staggered, catching herself against the trunk of a tree slick with sap.
A name. She needed a name.
Her name.
Think. Think.
Pain spiked through her skull. Fragments of memory flared and burned out. Faces without names. Words without meaning. A blur ofmissions and orders. Of fire, and blood, and betrayal spinning away from her like the debris of a dying star.
Her mouth shaped the syllables before her brain caught up.
“Aimee.” A whisper. Barely there. “I’m…Aimee.”
It steadied her. A little. Enough to try standing on her own.
